Monday, October 15. 2012

One of the most confusing things when reading about advanced science is the terminology used. For example, how much coverage of the research around Higgs Boson, or the "God Particle" focused on supposed links with religion? In fact the name God Particle was coined by Leon Ledermen in the book "The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question", where it had nothing to do with spirituality, but instead referred to the this particle's central role in modern Physics.

Careful definition of terminology is key to almost all scientific studies. Historically the focus was on defining terms ideas that seem commonsense, or that are so integral to our every day existence that it is taken for granted. This can lead to counter-intuitive results, or some divergence between the scientific term and the meaning of the term in everyday conversation. One of the first lessons in schoolbook Physics is on defining energy, with unusual properties such as that it can't be created or destroyed, only transformed into different forms. What most people mean by energy has more common with entropy, a term the students will not learn until much later. Terms used can help to convey some parallels between physical processes we are familiar with and those that we have no way to directly experience. Electric current has much in common with the current of flowing water, but the further we get from the scale we experience, the more strained these parallels become. Particle spin for example is difficult to conceptualize, certainly it seems to have little to do with the idea of a spinning sphere that we might imagine. With more recent particles scientists seem to have given up hope of tying them to intuitive concepts, the word Quark is apparently taken from a line of Joycean nonsense, there are charm quarks and strange quarks, and Quantum Chromodynamics describe colour forces that have nothing to do with "real life" colours.

I wonder what level of intuitive understanding an advanced phycisist who understands and works on these theories has of them? Do they actually have some way of visualising 2/3 spin up hadron, or do they just "do the maths"? The use of colors in chromodynamics makes it easier to draw interactions between these particles - does it make it easier to think about them? As the frontiers of physics move so far out that it takes the greatest minds in the world many years to come to a basic understanding, will the next advances come from better descriptions and that make existing theories easier to learn?